A blueprint for climate-friendly holiday cooking
The spotlight
Happy (almost) Thanksgiving, Looking Forward fam! However you celebrate this holiday, if you celebrate it, we hope you’re taking time this week to savor the company of family and friends, the changing of the seasons — and of course, food, glorious food.
Cooking a feast, whether it’s for two people or 20, can come with some stressful considerations. What to make? How much to make? How to budget time and money? And, since you’re here reading this newsletter, you may also be thinking about how to prepare delicious, celebratory meals that uphold your dedication to a clean, green, just world.
Food writer and recipe tester Caroline Saunders has given this some thought. Saunders worked at Grist for a number of years before heading to pastry school at Le Cordon Bleu Paris to pursue her passion for climate-friendly desserts. She started a podcast and a newsletter on the topic, and this week, we asked her to share some of her favorite tips and recipes for building climate awareness into holiday cooking.
For even more, check out Saunders’ story on the emerging genre of climate cookbooks
Before the feast
“When I have family or friends coming into town, I end up cooking in two streams,” Saunders says. The first stream is before the main event. For this lead-up time, Saunders emphasizes recipes that are easily riffable and can use whatever’s on hand to avoid waste and extra trips to the store.
For example, a grain salad and accompanying “fridge-door dressing” from Perfectly Good Food by Margaret and Irene Li, a cookbook that focuses on flexible cooking and kitchen confidence as an approach to zero-waste. “What those recipes do, and what all the recipes in that cookbook do, is get you to think in categories of ingredients and get you to try to remember some key ratios,” Saunders explains. The dressing, for instance, starts with two parts oil to one part acid. “You can go tangy, you can go creamy, but the point is that it makes you look at your fridge and say, ‘I have some basic sense of where to begin and I can just use what I have.”
Another recipe she loves, in a similar vein, is a halloumi, broccoli, and chickpea bake from One: Pot, Pan, Planet by Anna Jones. “It’s something where you can switch up the vegetables, the beans and pulses, you can swap the halloumi for tofu, and it all is doable on one tray in the oven really fast.”
The feast
Planning for a special feast offers an opportunity to think about what ingredients you want to put center stage — and how. That spotlight could be placed on a star from the plant or fungi kingdoms instead of a turkey or ham. “To the extent that there is some psychological appeal of a perfect, sexy main and a simplicity appeal of a one-ingredient main, mushrooms might be a good contender,” Saunders says. She’s also considering a recipe amusingly titled “A Rutabaga Pretending to Be Ham,” from the cookbook Eating for Pleasure, People, & Planet by Tom Hunt.
But climate-friendly swaps don’t have to be limited to replacing meat. “I like the idea, especially at these holiday cooking moments where you’re putting a little bit more time and attention into your cooking, to go beyond the basics of leaning into plants and using what’s on hand,” Saunders says, “to also think about biodiversity, and how eating a variety of things that grow relatively near you can actively contribute to restoring biodiversity and strengthening regional food systems.”
For example, she cites a wild rice pilaf with apples, cranberries, and pecans that Indigenous chef Mariah Gladstone contributed to the U.N.’s cookbook, For People and Planet. Starring an ingredient from your region, like wild rice in the Great Lakes area, can be a way to contribute to the health of local economies and ecosystems.
A meringue recipe from “Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planet” that stars whipped aquafaba — chickpea water — an ingredient that usually gets dumped down the drain. Caroline Saunders
Saunders also looks for ingredients that she can plan to feature in a variety of ways — like canned chickpeas. For part of her holiday menu, she’s planning to crisp some up to go on top of a carrot soup — and then she’ll use the water from the can, known as aquafaba, to whip into a meringue with blood orange and chocolate, another recipe from Eating for Pleasure, People, & Planet. “I love moments like that,” she says. “With a little bit of advanced planning, you can figure out, ‘Will I have a leftover portion of an ingredient that could be used in something else?’”
After the feast
I personally will eat leftovers until the day I die (of food poisoning) — but if you’re staring at your post-holiday fridge wondering what you’re going to do with the various Tupperwares and wrapped-up bits and bobs, Saunders has some suggestions to help you avoid sending that food to the landfill. “I think about a couple of scaffolding-type recipes that you could graft savory leftovers onto and sweet leftovers onto,” she says. On the savory side, things like stuffing, vegetables, and dinner rolls could be thrown together with eggs in a strata — a type of bready, eggy casserole dish that could make a crowd-pleasing brunch for whoever might still be kicking around the day after a holiday dinner. Saunders recommends this easily customizable recipe from the food blog Two Kooks in the Kitchen.
On the sweet side, any fruit leavings — apples that didn’t make it into the pie, cranberries that didn’t make it into the sauce — can be swapped into your favorite blueberry muffin recipe to go along with your strata brunch.
And if you’re fully maxed out on desserts, Saunders has a simple solution: the freezer. “In two months, you will no longer be tired of apple pie and you will be super thrilled to fold it into some vanilla ice cream while you watch The Great British Bake Off.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
More exposure
- Read: Saunders’ Grist feature on climate cookbooks, and the à la carte options they offer for how to think about eating in the era of planetary crisis
- Subscribe: to Pale Blue Tart, Saunders’ Substack newsletter (this week’s issue offers more tips for using up specific leftover ingredients)
- Read: a previous Looking Forward featuring Saunders’ insights on alternative grains to up your climate-friendly baking game
- Read: a story examining the evolution of our cultural relationship to leftovers (from Grist’s 2021 holiday makeover)
- Watch: a vintage Grist holiday cooking video, for more fun menu ideas
A parting shot
One of my favorite things to do with leftover vegetable scraps (carrot butts, onion skins, stems of any kind) is stash them in my freezer to turn into homemade vegetable stock. When I’ve got a full bag, I just add enough water to cover the stuff, a little salt and pepper, and boil for about an hour. Then strain out the scrappies, and voilà! Cheap soup broth.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A blueprint for climate-friendly holiday cooking on Nov 22, 2023.